By the time the 2011 racing season gets under way, the only place to find a carburetor in the Sprint Cup Series might be in NASCAR’s Hall of Fame.

Officials said today that they hope to replace carburetors with fuel injection, and have been testing potential systems with an eye toward making the change as soon as possible.

“We are in the process of the development and the testing and have been for probably six or eight months," ” said Robin Pemberton, vice president of competition for NASCAR.

“The easy part is to just build the fuel injection system. The thing that we need to put into play is how are we going to regulate it, and what’s going to be fair for everybody?”

NASCAR is one of the only racing organizations that continues to use carburetors in its series. Fuel injection is a more accurate, and efficient, way of delivering fuel into the engine. It has been around since the 1950s and has been in place on all passenger cars in the United States since the late 1980s.

Pemberton said some Cup teams have already been developing and working with systems with the expectation that such a move would eventually be made. Some teams, Pemberton said, “do have track time … on their early production or early prototype fuel injection system.